


steel and silk: a daughter of the fifth house

by glitteratiglue



Series: catching the stars in their hands [1]
Category: Star Trek: The Next Generation, Star Trek: The Next Generation (Movies)
Genre: Backstory, Canonical Character Death, Character Study, Families of Choice, Female-Centric, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-11
Updated: 2015-04-11
Packaged: 2018-03-22 08:38:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,768
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3722326
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/glitteratiglue/pseuds/glitteratiglue
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She is a child of two worlds, who wrote her own story without a template and found a place for herself among the stars.</p><p>(Or: how Deanna Troi learned to live.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	steel and silk: a daughter of the fifth house

**Author's Note:**

> All my feelings about Deanna Troi, in one fic.
> 
> ** Possible trigger: very brief mention of miscarriage (if you want specifics before reading, just ask).

If Deanna Troi had a childhood, it was fleeting, ephemeral; it fell away from her in an instant.

She is seven years old, and her father's body is on the slab. A mission gone awry, they said – such empty words to describe the way her world has shifted on its axis. Lwaxana falls apart in the mortuary, and Deanna stands silently at her side. That day, she becomes the parent and her mother the child.

In the years that follow, she forgets what it is to laugh – after all, her mother laughs enough for the both of them – and puts up walls around her heart. She grows up, and she tries not to lose her faith. Majoring in psychology is an odd choice for someone so afraid to look inside herself, but it is her choice, and slowly, she will come to know herself better through her studies of the mind.

Deanna meets Will, and to know him is to love him; a man with light in his eyes, too young to know what he wants. He has his heart set on a life in the stars, and she knows from the start that she could never ground him. Looking deeper, she sees someone who knew loss too young, like her, with weight on his shoulders, who has learned to laugh to make that burden lighter. He teaches her how to laugh, and she shows him how to be still.

Then he is gone and colours bleed from her wounded skies, until she decides for herself that she _will_ not hurt anymore.

Will is many things to her, but he is not her reason or her life. She will make a life for herself, out of everything she is.

Deanna chooses Starfleet, and it has nothing whatsoever to do with Will Riker. When she stands in a sea of recruits, holds up her hand and swears the oath of service to the Federation, she is thinking of a man who told her stories of sheriffs and saloon towns and sang her to sleep. Her father told her that serving as an officer was not about great deeds or flair: it was about building a life you could be proud of. She will come to cling to that in her darkest moments, when it would be easier to just give up.

The academy is tough at first. Her mind screams with the undisciplined thoughts of humans, and she craves a silence she will never have. The red cadet uniform closets and chokes her – to be one of many feels like drowning on dry land – and she longs for silk next to her skin.

She forgets she is strong and agile, that she climbed the heights of trees on her home planet and can do the splits without breaking a sweat. Here, her body is soft and she stands too straight and speaks too formally, marking herself out as someone who _does not belong._ The empathic gifts of a half-Betazoid leave her isolated, and even feared.

Deanna takes that fear and wears it like a badge of honour; if she can't be liked, then this will have to do.

Every day, she is the first one in the gym and the last one in the library late at night; she grew up on Betazed, after all, and she has discipline over herself that the others can only dream of. She breathes deep with lungs of steel that are not her own, maintains this new body of sharp edges and muscle where before there was only softness – because Deanna Troi is a Starfleet officer, and she would never let anyone forget it.

One day, during martial arts drills, she makes a wrong move and goes flying off the mat with a thump. The other cadets laugh cruelly, and though bruised and humiliated, Deanna draws herself up to the height of a daughter of the Fifth House and gives them all a withering stare she has practised in the mirror many times.

Gradually, she finds friends who are like-minded and learns to give herself a break.

After graduation, she feels quiet satisfaction when, within a couple of years, she takes the pips of a lieutenant commander and pins them to her collar, all while many of the people who taunted her are still languishing in lesser ranks.

Deanna rises to that rank so early because it is not enough for her to be good at what she does, she has to be the _best._ She works, and, remembering the words of her father, she builds. Her words and deeds are bricks and mortar. From the ground up, she works to expand Starfleet's fledgling psychology division, and to train the first ship's counselors.

Her career takes off. Jean-Luc Picard wants her for the _USS Enterprise-D –_ the flagship, Galaxy-class and every inch a vessel built for exploration – and she is simultaneously thrilled and terrified. Cup of coffee in hand, Deanna pores over the ship's schematics late into the night, because she _will_ impress her captain, and she wants to prove she is more than just an excellent psychologist who muscled her way into this rank.

At their first meeting, she stands tall and proud before his desk, and will not shrink under the captain's gimlet-eyed stare, the way the other officers he sizes up surely must do. A difficult and private man though Picard is, he considers her competent from the start, and that is more than anyone else has ever thought of her. She likes him instantly.

Other crew members disapprove of her civilian attire, her elaborate beaded hairstyles, not knowing that she wants to keep a part of herself, to remember what it is to be Betazoid while she lives among those who are slaves to their emotions. When they distrust her for being an empath and question her professionalism because she is beautiful, she reminds herself that inside of her, there is steel, and no-one can take that from her.

On the _Enterprise,_ Deanna builds, patiently and slowly and surely, the way her father taught her. She builds herself up to a position where she earns the trust and respect of her crew, forms friendships, and finds a new family to build around herself.

Tasha Yar is her first friend on the ship; she understands what it is to live by your sharp edges, because all the things you have are hard-won and you must always prove that you belong. When she dies, Deanna feels no grief – that's too base and simplistic a word – but that day, a light inside her goes out, never to be kindled again (many years later, she and Will name their daughter after Tasha, a baby conceived against all odds after a terrible loss, a joy that frightens her beyond belief, and it's the name – Tasha's name – that will finally give her the strength to be a mother).

And there is Will, by some unfathomable coincidence of the cosmos. At first, he struggles to understand her, not knowing the ways she has hardened since he loved her. In time, he learns her again, and she gets to know a man who has grown into himself and shrugged off the self-consciousness of youth.

Beverly becomes her second self, and helps her to learn that she can be brave without hiding every part of herself away. Worf and Data are her kindred spirits, the friends who are so unlike her and yet so similar – the outsiders, always striving to belong – and Will is her constant, the one who can keep her grounded.

She forgets what it is to be alone and afraid. On this ship, she finds her family.

They are tested by the Borg, the Cardassians, by too many missions and too many species for her to ever remember them all, and still, she builds. She builds with tired hands and a weary heart and pieces her crew back together time and time again, and she is glad to do it. 

Losing another close friend is no easier than it was the first time around, but with the loss of Data also comes new beginnings: a new ship, a new crew to win over, and new friendships.

On the _USS Titan,_ she builds her skills and talents, but not alone. She learns to practise diplomacy with a light touch and one hand on her phaser.

With Will, she builds a marriage and a life together. Through his acceptance and his love, she finds she does not need to keep her strength for herself, but she can share it with him, and let his strength be her own. It's strength they found by themselves in the long years apart: a daughter of the Fifth House with high walls around her heart, and a son who never knew what it was to be loved.

Deanna never regrets those years, because somewhere along the way, Will learned how to be whole and she learned that she could break without shattering herself into pieces. Now he is a captain, but she still sees in him echoes of that young man with weight on his shoulders. This time, she is the one who reminds him to laugh, and through his explorer's eyes she sees the world with new wonder.

She sees herself in the young, anxious women who come to her office, struggling with themselves, and she wants to tell them: _I was you, once._ Instead, she listens and helps them to recognise the best parts of who they are, to know that who they are is  _enough._

Her life stops being about control. She becomes more relaxed, less guarded, but she is no less protective of herself. Sometimes she weaves heirloom jewels of Betazed into her hair, braids it tightly to her scalp, and remembers who she is and where she came from.

She is a child of two worlds, who wrote her own story without a template and found a place for herself among the stars. People who don't know her wonder how she can laugh so easily and so often. They don't know it comes from years of not fitting into your own skin, from trial and error and painful experiences.

Deanna Troi has built a life that is entirely her own; her bruises and her joy have become the bricks and mortar of who she is.

Looking in the mirror, she traces the lines on her face without rancour; they are the proof that she has weathered storms and survived. The steel of her body has softened with time, but there is steel inside her, and she _lives._

**Author's Note:**

> I drew inspiration from all over to tell Deanna's story: the series, the films, novels, particularly the _Titan_ books, and my own headcanons, which are no doubt inspired by so many of you out there who love to read, write and talk about this amazing character.


End file.
